Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Picking up a new language as an adult

My wife Elspeth Jones, herself a linguist and linguistics graduate, recently taught herself some Romanian whilst on a working trip with universities there. She reflects on the process of learning a new language from scratch as an adult. There may be one or two useful lessons for language teachers....

On a recent visit to Romania I was challenged to learn 100 words over the two weeks by Adrian Georgescu, one of my team members. For a linguist this shouldn’t be too difficult but it was a long time since I’d learned a new language from scratch and some of the first words I learned did not seem to relate to other languages, such as "mulțumesc" for thank you and "bună" dimineața, good morning.

I have lived in several countries and speak a number of languages to various levels of fluency: Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Oriental. It turns out that Romanian has some unusual characteristics and influences from several language groups. A word one might expect to be easy such as ‘to speak’ is actually ‘a vorbi’. And then at other times the word is easily recognisable from French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian, like ‘foarte’ (very). So I became increasingly interested and soon my patient teacher’s challenge changed. I was to 1) provide 25 Romanian words of my choice 2) give the Romanian for 25 words provided by my teacher 3) produce six sentences of at least eight words 4) in conversation, answer two unknown questions in a sentence of at least eight words.

As regular readers of this blog will imagine, the question of ‘comprehensible input’ is a frequent topic in our house, so when I came home we discussed the language learning strategies I had used for this challenge. Adrian was endlessly patient and what luxury to have a native speaker willing to answer my incessant questions. It also helped that everyone I met was delightful and apparently positively inclined to my halting efforts. Of course I was also surrounded by visual clues – signs, advertising hoardings, shop names and so on.

But what were the strategies I used and was there anything which might offer pointers for language teachers in the classroom?

Moving from words to sentences I couldn’t understand why verb forms always seemed to be ‘irregular’, and what on earth was going on with articles and possessives? So I took to the internet for some answers. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t expected to find so much information on a language spoken by a relatively small number of people. Once I understood that there were four verb conjugation types, things began to make more sense, although it wasn’t any easier to learn them! Grammar lessons are never wasted on a learner like me.

Memorising patterns, writing everything down, reviewing everything I’d learned at the end of each day, learning chunks of language and then breaking them down into meaningful sections, were all important, being able to visualise where the word was in my notebook and which other words were around it, which words were not as you’d expect from other languages and conversely which were as predicted, even remembering where we were when I asked Adrian for a new word or sentence, all of these helped me to remember vocabulary and eventually full sentences.

I also have some Romanian friends on Facebook and picked up words from their posts. Motivating factors were that my teacher was willing to be mercilessly exploited but I also wanted to please him, the sense of progress being made and the ultimate challenge of ‘examination’ on the return flight to Bucharest were all part of the challenge, and it was just great fun. Also I’m a pretty motivated linguist, it has to be said.

Some of these strategies are a function of being an experienced adult linguist and knowing what works for me, but they also reflect the importance of different learning styles. There were words which stayed with me just from hearing them but others I had to write down and constantly revise.

So comprehensible input is all very well, but how would I step up to the conversation part of the test, listening to questions with new vocabulary and making up novel sentences? I was reminded that being able to break down chunks of language depends on knowing at least some of the words involved and trying to guess the others you don’t know and this relies on knowing where words begin and end.

The first time I heard Steve discussing with a friend "l’effet de serre", I thought they were saying ‘f é deux r’ and I simply couldn’t get it. Equally, one of the questions in my exam was ‘Spune-mi ceva frumos despre soţul tâu’ (tell me something nice about your husband) – all I could hear in the middle was ‘d’espresso’ because I hadn’t come across the word ‘despre’ before.

Lessons to be learned? Motivation plus comprehensible input, using personal learning strategies and having the opportunity to practise results in success. This was a privileged period of intensive learning in an immersion context, but still with the same fundamental tactics. The only problem is that if the motivation is lacking, everything becomes more difficult. Sadly I can’t offer any insight into how that is developed. I now need a Romanian friend to practise with or it could all disappear!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Comments

What an excellent post. I can empathise with every single point you make, and I agree with your conclusion. How are you going to go about finding a Romanian friend? The internet opens many possibilities, especially for adults who are willing to have ago and do not mind taking risks!

Thanks Helen. Unfortunately our part of the UK doesn't seem to attract many Romanians but I live in hope. Adrian continues to send me little challenges via email - he's so patient. I hear you are learning Dutch? Veel geluk en geniet ervan!

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I've been dipping into The Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (2017) edited by Loewen and Sato. This blog is a succinct summary of Chapter 16 by Beatriz González-Fernández and Norbert Schmitt on the topic of teaching vocabulary. I hope you find it useful.

1. Background

The authors begin by outlining the clear importance of vocabulary knowledge in language acquisition, stating that it's a key predictor of overall language proficiency (e.g. Alderson, 2007). Students often say that their lack of vocabulary is the main reason for their difficulty understanding and using the language (e.g. Nation, 2012). Historically vocabulary has been neglected when compared to grammar, notably in the grammar-translation and audio-lingual traditions as well as communicative language teaching.

(My note: this is also true, to an extent, of the oral-situational approach which I was trained in where most vocabulary is learned incidentally as part of question-answer sequence…

Instead of getting students to transcribe immediately what you say, or what a partner says, you can enforce a 10 second delay so that students have to keep running over in their heads what they have heard. Some teachers have even used the delay time to try to distract students with music.

It’s an added challenge for students but has significant value, I think. It reminds me of a phenomenon in music called audiation. I use it frequently as a singer and I bet you do too.

Audiation is thought to be the foundation of musicianship. It takes place when we hear and comprehend music for which the sound is no longer or may never have been present. You can audiate when listening to music, performing from notation, playing “by ear,” improvising, composing, or notating music. When we have a song going round in our mind we are audiating. When we are deliberately learning a song we are audiating.

In our language teaching case, though, the earworm is a word, chunk of l…

Read many books and articles about listening and you’ll see it described as the forgotten skill. It certainly seems to be the one which causes anxiety for both teachers and students. The reasons are clear: you only get a very few chances to hear the material, exercises feel like tests and listening is, well, hard. Just think of the complex processes involved: segmenting the sound stream, knowing lots of words and phrases, using grammatical knowledge to make meaning, coping with a new sound system and more. Add to this the fact that in England they have recently decided to make listening tests harder (too hard) and many teachers are wondering what else they can do to help their classes.

For students to become good listeners takes lots of time and practice, so there are no quick fixes. However, I’m going to suggest, very concisely, what principles could be the basis of an overall plan of action. These could be the basis of a useful departmental discussion or day-to-day chats about meth…

If your A-level students would like opportunities to practise listening there are plenty of sources you can recommend for accessible, largely comprehensible and interesting material. Here are some I have come across while searching for resources over recent years.

I love this site. It's fresh, youthful and full of really interesting material. They have an archive of videos, both short and long, from various sources, grouped under a range of themes: insolite
(weird news items), science, discovery, technology, ecology and
lifestyle. There should be something there to interest all your students
while adding to their broader education. Here is one I enjoyed (I shall seriously think about buying tomatoes in winter now):

This site has been around for years and is the work of a university team in Marseilles. You get a mixture of audio and video material complete with transcripts and explanations.This is much more about the personal lives of the students …

Dylan Wiliam, the academic most associated with Assessment for Learning (AfL), aka formative assessment, has stated that these labels have not been the most helpful to teachers. He believes that they have been partly responsible for poor implementation of AfL and the fact that AfL has not led to the improved outcomes originally intended.

“The point I was making—years ago now—is that it would have been much easier if we had called formative assessment "responsive teaching". However, I now realize that this wouldn't have helped since it would have given many people the idea that it was all about the teacher's role.”

I suspect he’s right about the appellation and its consequences. As a teacher I found it hard to get my head around the terms AfL and formative assess…

frenchteacher.net

Twitter

Bio

I did my first degree in French and Linguistics at Reading University and my MA in second language acquisition at the Institute of Education, London. I taught at Tiffin School, Hampton School, then was Head of Modern Languages at Ripon Grammar School in Yorkshire for 24 years. I now write resources for frenchteacher.net, train PGCE students at Buckingham University, present at occasional events, blog and work for the AQA exam board training and writing teacher support resources.

Publications

The Language Teacher Toolkit (2016), a handbook for teachers, co-authored with Gianfranco Conti